| Heroes | Thomas Jefferson
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." --Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, 1789
Tom Paine
TomPaine.commonsense
Mark Twain
"It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not."
"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them."
Joseph Campbell
"What is intended by art, metaphysics, and mystical
religion is not knowledge of anything, not truth, or goodness
or beauty, but an evocation of a sense of the absolutely unknowable.
Science, on the other hand, will take care of what can be known."
"Any religious symbol so interpreted that it refers not to a thought-transcending mystery but to a thought-enveloping social order, misappropriates to the lower principle the values of the higher and so (to use a theological turn of phrase) sets Satan in the seat of God."
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